Work-In-Progress Reports for October 2004

Atari ST Technical Documents Needed: Thankfully for us, the Atari ST was made up of mostly off the shelf parts. However, it seems that the datasheets or technical specifications for many of the parts are now hard to find. Fortunately we already possess most of the original Atari documents. (more)

Atari ST Emulators and IPF: What comes first, IPF support in an emulator or the final preserved Atari ST IPF images? The answer is (ideally) both. However, to give ourselves a platform to test with, we decided to take Atari ST IPF support into our own hands. Firstly we took the WinSTon sources and got them to compile with the latest Direct X (a non-trivial task). (more)

Atari ST Developments: Authenticity Checks: Disk Modification on the ST The Atari ST FDC is a much higher quality device than the Amiga's, so detecting modified disks is not quite as easy, though it is certainly possible. Initially, we will get the analyser to complain if it finds a suspect image, and do the real work "manually". We will then add automatic detection at a later date.((This has since been resolved. (more)

Started on Atari ST Support: Since there were nearly no dumps submitted in the last few weeks, we started working on Atari ST support. See the previous WIP to read about the support work - generic hardware MFM support. We will soon be programmatically generating scripts for the analyser to produce Atari ST images. This is unfortunately impossible for the Commodore Amiga. (more)